The Supreme Dick of the Supreme Court

I long have been of the opinion that Justice Antonin Scalia, for all his operatic disdain for the lesser creatures with whom he has to share the bench of the Supreme Court, and for all his even more operatic contempt for some of the lower orders who dare bring their petty complaints to the bar of his coruscating intellect, is basically just a lazy old fart who's basically just running out his clock on his day-job the way a lot of people who are bored with their work do.

As we learned this week, in which a series of Court decisions made gay people who want to get married happy, and virtually everyone else—especially employees and minorities who may want to vote—miserable, the real walking id of the Court's preposterously Janus-faced conservative faction is Justice Samuel Alito, who turns out to be not only a reliable reactionary voice on almost every issue, but a colossal dick besides.

It began with two decisions concerning the possible remedies that can be sought by employees who face racial, sexual, or some other kind of harassment in the workplace. The two decisions—Vance v. Ball State University and University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center v. Nassar—were as bad, and as thoroughly detached from empirical reality, as they possibly could be. Especially the former. The case involved a kitchen worker at Ball State who accused a supervisor of harassing her because she was the only black person working on the staff. Spectacularly, the case turned, essentially, on who qualified as a "supervisor."

Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it's far easier for a plaintiff to win a harassment case against a supervisor than fellow employees, even if the latter have been vested by upper echelons with supervisory functions. The hitch, as Ian Millhiser explains, is that the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit decided that only those with "the power to hire, fire, demote, promote, transfer, or discipline an employee" are fit to be called "supervisors."

In other words, your supervisor can't harass you, but he or she can subcontract the job of making your life a living hell to whoever wants it. However, Sam Alito, who will never have a supervisor again in his life, has no problem seeing past the problems of those of us who will. The alternative, he argued, "would make the determination of supervisor status depend on a highly case specific evaluation of numerous factors."

Which is precisely the way the world works in 99 percent of the jobs in this country these days. His extraordinarily tortured explanation—even by Supreme Court standards—continued.

"In such cases, the victims will be able to prevail simply by showing that the employer was negligent in permitting this harassment to occur," he said.

I think we can all agree that this is a very interesting concept of the word "simply," which does not carry the same meaning in the world without supervisors as it does in the world the rest of us inhabit. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented, and seems to be familiar, at least, with the fact that we don't all work as justices of the United States Supreme Court.

"The limitation the Court decrees," she wrote, "disserves the objective of Title VII to prevent discrimination from infecting the Nation's workplaces."

Later, we learned from both Garrett Epps and Dana Milbank that, while Ginsburg was reading her dissent, Alito was grimacing his way through an authentic seventh-grade temper-tantrum a few seats down. This is of a piece with the memorable moment in which he enlivened the president's State of the Union address by shaking his head and mouthing "No, not true" on camera, when the president called him and the rest of them out on the inevitable consequences of their decision in Citizens United case. And it is also of a piece with his confirmation hearings, when his wife was forced to flee the committee room in tears because Judge Sam was being asked uncomfortable questions by those awful tradesmen in the United States Senate. Scalia is simply the court jester. Alito is the king of the dicks, the last and lasting vengeance of George W. Bush.

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